Beamish Museum

The open-air Beamish Museum spreads out over 300 acres, with buildings taken from all over the region painstakingly reassembled in six main sections linked by restored trams and buses. Complete with costumed shopkeepers, workers and householders, four of the sections show life in 1913, before the upheavals of World War I, including a colliery village complete with drift mine (regular tours throughout the day) and a large-scale recreation of the High Street in a market town. Two areas date to 1825, at the beginning of the northeast’s industrial development, including a manor house, with horse yard, formal gardens, vegetable plots and orchards. You can ride on the beautifully restored steam-powered carousel, the Steam Galloper – dating from the 1890s – and the Pockerley Waggonway, which is pulled along by a replica of George Stephenson’s Locomotion, the first passenger-carrying steam train in the world.